sendmail (instead of netcat)

[JarDo]

I've been trying for over a solid month to get sendmail to function on unraid because sending email with netcat just isn't doing the trick for me.  I figured if I got a real MSP up and functioning all my email issues would go away. 

 

I'm begging for help.  Someone, please anyone, who'd be willing to lend a hand. 

 

I really tried to not come here for help because I know asking for linux help is off topic, but I REALLY want solid email functionality on my unraid server.

 

I have never before not been able to figure something like this out, but I'm not a linux guy.  I believe the solution is simple to the linux savy, but I'm fighting so many little problems that I'm just chaseing my tail now.

[NAS]

this forum is very active for this type of hack. If i were you i would spend some time documenting what you have done and what problems you face. More likely to get the thread started that way.

[JarDo]

Well, suffice to say my hope was to figure this out on my own and then post here how I did it.  If folks will help me with the process the end result would be the same.

 

I'm attempting to install sendmail on a licensed copy of unraid 4.2.  My goal is to configure sendmail as a SMTP nullclient that sends mail through my Comcast account (or Gmail, Yahoo, fastmail, whatever works).  I don't need for sendmail to be able to receive email (MSP) I just want it to be able to send email from my unraid server (MTA).  I would use this capibility to send status reports and the like to myself because at some point my server will be headless and I need to know when my unraid server needs attention.

 

I'm installing the following via the go script and there doesn't appear to be any installation issues:

# Install all custom packages

installpkg /boot/user/packages/openssl-0.9.8g-i486-1.tgz

installpkg /boot/user/packages/openssh-4.7p1-i486-2.tgz

 

#  install MTA

installpkg /boot/user/packages/sendmail-8.14.2-i486-1.tgz

installpkg /boot/user/packages/sendmail-cf-8.14.2-noarch-1.tgz

installpkg /boot/user/packages/m4-1.4.9-i486-1.tgz

installpkg /boot/user/packages/procmail-3.22-i486-2.tgz

 

I got all these packages from http://packages.slackware.it/.  I probably don't need all the crap above, but right now I'm working on 'capibility' - just get the damn thing to work.  Later I'll worry about cleaning up the install and documenting the process.

 

I've got 2 primary issues I'm trying to solve.  I'm focusing on #2 below first because I think that it is getting in the way of my trouble-shooting #1:

 

#1 - Configuration of 'submit.mc' to create a nullclient MTA.  It seems my biggest difficulty is with authenticating with the remote SMTP server.

#2 - linux (slackware) and/or sendmail configuration - user/group permissions or something else - to eliminate the following error (from /var/log/syslog) when attempting to send email:  "low on space (smtp.comcast.net needs 15 bytes + 0 blocks in /var/spool/clientmqueue), max avail:0"

 

So, I've been focusing on #2 lately because it seems to be an issue with my machine - not with sendmail.  For some reason sendmail is not able to write email to the message queue which it wants to be able to do before it attempts to send.  To sendmail it appears as if there is no more space on the disk where /var/spool/clientmqueue resides.  My bet is that it has something to do with having the file system in RAM, but I'm not sure.  The issue could also be with user/group permissions, but since the package install process is what added the /var/spool/clientmqueue directory I'm assuming that same process set the user/group permissions to what they need to be.

 

[josetann]

Easy solution is to create an mqueue directory elsewhere on another disk.  I used one of my hard drives, you can try your usb flash though.  Delete the /var/spool/mqueue directory, then link it with the other directory you made.  Start (or restart) sendmail, and you should be good to go.